Directories Forum

I am sure I used to see a message when submitting to dmoz, that you could submit again in ?6? weeks if you were not successful.

Now I see a warning on their site not to submit more than once. Does anyone know what is OK and what is not in that respect?

And I guess there needs to be a second part to that question. If it is OK to resubmit, how often (without peeing the editor off) should I do it?

OK, a third part to the question is also, do ODP editors actually ignore submissions until they have been submitted a number of times?

And the inevitable forth part is does the content have to change at all if you are sure it is OK? Or are they going to say, "no change of html / content, no change in being listed (or not)"?

:-)

ps A bit of info for everyone. ODP track your submission IP address. If you get the submission page then suffer a disconnection, then reconnect with a different ISP, and then submit, you get an ODP can not verify your IP warning! Guess they put value in where you submit from.

Just try to put yourself in the editor's shoes, apply some common sense, and you might be surprised at the results! ;)

The most important "rule" is this: Try to create as little unnecessary work for the editors as possible, and your chances of getting listed will improve significantly.

do ODP editors actually ignore submissions until they have been submitted a number of times?

That would mean that the editors create unnecessary work for themselfes - not very likely. There are several possibilities why your site was not listed after the first submission(s):

Quality: The site had no (not enough) unique content, lots of broken links, HTML that doesn't display in all browsers, etc. This is subjective to a certain degree, but you'll have to accept the editor's decision. Redundancy: The site (or a mirror of it) is already listed appropriately, or you submitted a deeplink (= subpage) to an already listed site. Workload: The category has no editors (or very busy ones), and the "parent" editors had no time looking there. Several instances of your submission may still be sitting in the unreviewed queue, the more the worse. Relevance: It was submitted to the wrong category, and an editor sent it to a better place, starting again at the top of this list for the editors of that other category.

A bit of info for everyone. ODP track your submission IP address. If you get the submission page then suffer a disconnection, then reconnect with a different ISP, and then submit, you get an ODP can not verify your IP warning! Guess they put value in where you submit from.

This is only relevant for extremely abusive submitters. The average editor will not look at your IP for every submission. The more interesting information is the editing log as such. If an editor sees that a submitted site has been deleted from the unreviewed queue more than a dozen times before, then there are chances that he'll take a more critical look at its quality and relevance than he would do otherwise. And if he has to mass-delete a dozen submissions of the same site (eg. when cleaning up a previously unmaintained category), then he may accidentally forget to leave one instance in place for listing. This can happen without any malevolence - if you're digging through a queue of hundreds of mostly duplicate and irrelevant submissions, you just try to get through as efficiently as possible.

And unfortunately it's really true (even if hard to believe if you've never seen it yourself): On average, an editor will only be able to list around 10% of the submissions to any category. The rest are duplicates, deeplinks, irrelevant to the category, just bogus URLs, or any other weirdness you could think of. If you stick out by placing yourself with those 10%, then the editor will project some frendly thoughts into your general direction and happily list your site.

But I am 100% sure my (friends) site is up to standard, submitted to the correct category, has no broken links etc. The category does also have an editor.

So, then being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea (please assume the site is 100% worthy of dmoz). What would you recommend? Resubmit or not? And will the previously stated "OK to re-submit in 6 weeks" get me in hot water? After all, that statement was put there for a reason right?

I just want to know what the status is of a submission.... if I knew it was sitting in an unreviewed bin, it would be different than if I knew it was rejected. I think if they sent out rejection letters, then people would submit less, write less letters, etc.... maybe not, I don't know.... but I do know I would pay them money to review a site. Why don't they have a biz ex section? no one ever seems to question that.

I honestly have no idea why they used to recommend resubmitting, as from an editor's perspective, it really doesn't make any sense. In theory, resubmitting shouldn't get you into hot water, except for really excessive cases. In practise, the applicable definition of "excessive" will depend on the resident editor(s).

It has repeatedly been a subject of discussion in the internal ODP forums that some kind of indication to the submitter of the state of his submission would be helpful in reducing duplicates. But I have no information if staff plans to implement such a feature (they tend not to brag about planned features until they're actually available). Right now, all you can do is ask an editor about it.

You can sticky-mail me the URL, and I'll try to figure out what happened to it. As is the case for all editors, my license to divulge any real interna is very limited (as in nonexistent ;)), but I guess I can still give you an indication of the average water temperature to expect for your next submission. Also note that I can't do more than look, as most likely I won't have editing priviledges in your area of interest.

Here's a generalized version of my findings (details sent by sticky-mail):

Newbie tried to submit a discussion site to a category in the Shopping/Health/ branch of the ODP, that the resident editor hadn't touched for the last two months. This means that it's probably still sitting in the unreviewed queue, but won't get listed in that category anyway.

Instead, a site for discussion (more generally: information) about health issues should go to a relevant category in the Health/ branch, even if it deals with a specific product or class of products. In our case, it seems likely that the listing will get accepted within reasonable time there. The Shopping/ tree is reserved for sites where the visitors can actually buy stuff through an online shopping system on that site.

Two things to learn: An insider and an outsider may easily come to different conclusions about the "correct" category to submit a site to, and you should never be in a hurry when submitting to the ODP... ;)